Checking Back on 2011′s PPC Predictions

Posted on December 26, 2011 by

Around this time last year, I made a few PPC predictions for 2011. And every year, I like to reflect back on what I said and see how my predictions panned out. Let’s take a look at what I said, and how it worked out:

Prediction #1: PPC Effort Increases, Although Spending Does Not

I think I was half-right on this one. PPC effort has no doubt increased, with new targeting options, ad extensions, and search engine policy changes keeping even the most experienced paid search marketers on their toes. However, PPC spending has still shown a strong trend of increasing year-over-year. According to a study by Ignition One, a digital marketing firm, total search spend was up 7.2% year-over-year Q3 2011 vs. Q3 2010, and search spend was up 11.8% YoY Q2 2011 vs. Q2 2010. Another study by Performics showed that this year’s Black Friday search spending was up 112% vs. Black Friday 2010, and Cyber Monday search spending increased 68% year-over-year. There’s clearly more room to grow in the PPC space as more retailers get online, and more consumers make the switch from brick-and-mortar purchases to e-commerce. I’m going to stop predicting a plateau for PPC spending. Based on the last couple of years, I expect search spending to continue growing for quite some time.

Prediction #2: Microsoft makes significant improvements to AdCenter to compete better with Google

100% true. AdCenter has really stepped up their game this year, adding a better UI, better data visualizations, enhanced geographic targeting, quality score calculations, and more sensible budget options to their product. Ever since the Yahoo/Bing search alliance, it seems like Microsoft has been making a flurry of improvements to their advertising platform to continue to make it a viable option for search advertisers. The only persistent problem is market share – Google is still the 800-pound gorilla in the room on that one, and it doesn’t look like they’re about to give up that search traffic share any time soon. I think that Microsoft has decided to stop going head-to-head with the Big G, and instead offer themselves as a complementary product to reach an audience that has rejected Google for whatever reason. Case in point: this year, AdCenter made it stupidly easy to export an AdWords campaign and import it directly into your AdCenter account. This shows that Microsoft is aware that search marketers aren’t facing a choice between AdWords and AdCenter. They’re almost forced to use Google, the choice is whether or not to supplement that coverage with AdCenter. I’m on record for being in favor of using AdCenter, and with the product improvements they’ve done in 2011, it has become a much easier choice to make.

Prediction #3: Facebook PPC gets big

True. On a personal level, I’ve been hearing a lot more about Facebook ads than in previous years. But to really back me up, let’s run some numbers:

Google Ad Revenue, Q1-Q3 2011: $26,357,000,000
Bing Ad Revenue, 2011 (estimated by eMarketer): $1,470,000,000
Facebook Revenue, Q1-Q3 2011 (according to a Gawker source): $2,500,000,000

If Gawker is to be believed, then Facebook is on pace for driving twice the ad revenue that AdCenter is. Not surprising, since by some estimates Facebook is now responsible for one third of online ad impressions in the US. Facebook has already reached ubiquity in the lives of most everyone with a first-world internet connection. It’s not surprising that they would evolve into one of the most valuable advertising platforms out there, since Facebook captures so much of the world’s attention. They’ve still got a long way to go before they overtake Google, though.

So the final tally is 2.5 out of three. Better than last year! Join me next week, when I take a shot at some PPC predictions for 2012.

Posted in Bing, Facebook, Google AdWords, Microsoft AdCenter, Search Engines | Leave a comment

Fixing AdWords Quality Score Issues (Part 4 of 4)

Posted on December 19, 2011 by

Note: this is the fourth part of a four part series detailing how to improve AdWords quality score issues at each level of your account. Check out part 1 here, part 2 here, and part 3 here.

In this final installment of our “Fixing AdWords Quality Score Issues” series, we’ll be covering quality score issues on the Google Display Network. Quality score on the display network is calculated a little differently than your search campaigns, because the user experience is so different. Users are actively searching for information in search network campaigns, but have information presented to them passively on the display network. Here’s what Google has to say about display network quality score, taken from their help topic on the subject:

The Quality Score for calculating an ad’s eligibility to appear on a particular Display Network site, as well as the ad’s position on that site, consists of the following factors:

  • The ad’s past performance on this and similar sites
  • The relevance of the ads and keywords in the ad group to the site
  • The quality of your landing page
  • Other relevance factors

The Quality Score for determining if a placement-targeted ad will appear on a particular site depends on the campaign’s bidding option.

If the campaign uses cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) bidding, Quality Score is based on:

  • The quality of your landing page

If the campaign uses cost-per-click (CPC) bidding, Quality Score is based on:

  • The historical CTR of the ad on this and similar sites
  • The quality of your landing page

So you can see that a lot of the factors that influence quality score in the search network also have bearing on your display network quality score. You still need to make sure that you have high-quality, relevant ads (that will help you achieve a high historical click-through rate), and your landing page is highly relevant to your ads and appears to be a quality site to Google (basically, it should not seem spammy).

The unique quality score factor that you can control only on the display network is the placements in which your ad appears. You can’t exclude Google or the search partner sites from showing your ads in search network campaigns, but you can pick and choose which web pages your ads appear on in the display network. Remember – a single bad placement could impact your ad-group and campaign-level quality scores in display network campaigns. It could be even worse if you’re not picky about your placements and you have a lot of low-CTR ads as a result. To fix this, you need to periodically review the placements in which your ads appear, and remove targeted placements or add negative placements whenever it’s appropriate. Cutting out the low performers should help your ad CTR improve, which will help repair any quality score damage as you accrue a good account history.

You should also take note of the relevance between the product you’re offering and the sites your ads are appearing on. Whenever your ads don’t match up well to the page content, you’ll not only notice worse performance, but you might actually incur a relevance penalty from Google that could cause a dip in quality score. If a placement is not relevant (determined either by common sense, or poor performance stats like CTR and conversion rate), then you should exclude it from your display network campaign to prevent potential quality score damage.

And finally, be aware that Google is not only rating your quality score based on the sites your placement is appearing on, it’s also taking into account your performance on similar sites. If you start to see your quality score really suffer, you may need to take out entire categories of placements (i.e. coupon sites or auto blogs) to repair the damage.

And that’s it for quality score. If you have any personal successes with quality score improvement, I’d love to hear about them – just leave me a note in the comments.

Posted in Display Network, Google AdWords, Landing Pages, PPC Basics, Quality Score, Search Engines, Text Ads | 1 Comment

Fixing AdWords Quality Score Issues (Part 3 of 4)

Posted on December 12, 2011 by

Note: this is the second part of a four part series detailing how to improve AdWords quality score issues at each level of your account. Check out part 1 here and part 2 here.

This week in the “Fixing AdWords Quality Score Issues” series, we’re going to cover quality score repairs at the ad and keyword level.

Ad Level

Of all the elements in your account, your ad may have the greatest influence on your quality score. Most of the points outlined in Google’s quality score help file deal with ads, particularly these:

  • The historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on the Google domain
  • Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
  • The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
  • The quality of your landing page
  • The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
  • The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query

The two main points are click-through rate (CTR) and relevance. A more relevant ad should generate a higher CTR, so the points are intertwined. History plays a role too. You can’t generate a solid CTR history without time, and a good account history is probably the most influential factor in quality score based on my experience. So that means you’ll have to be constantly vigilant in maintaining a good CTR and high relevance for all of your text and image ads so that you can develop a solid account history.

But every good account history has a beginning. Start by creating highly relevant ads off the bat. A highly relevant ad should contain one of the top traffic-driving keywords in your ad group. Preferably, this keyword should be in the headline, but within either description line is fine, too. When a user’s search query appears in a text ad, it gets bolded. That should help draw your customers’ attention and give you a little CTR boost. Also hint that searcher will find what they are looking for if they click on your ad. Prove to them that you’re going to solve their problem, and they’ll click on your ad. Also, don’t be afraid to use ad features like sitelinks and ratings stars. These have been shown to increase CTR in testing, and that extra CTR boost might make a difference in a quality score point or two.

Also remember that you’re being judged on the domain that appears in your ad. This may not matter so much if you only have one domain to advertise, but it could make a huge difference if you have several microsites within the same AdWords account. It may be better for you to have separate accounts for each microsite, and use an MCC (My Client Center) interface to manage them all.

Lastly, consider your landing page. Make sure the keywords in your ad group appear on your landing page. Also, you definitely want to ensure that anything you promised in your text ad is going to be delivered on your landing page. If you promise a discount in your ad and it never gets mentioned on your website, you might lose a customer and take a hit on your relevance score as well.

Keyword Level

What you do at the keyword level is going to affect the ad level (for good or for ill), so it’s best to work on these in tandem. First off, make sure that your keyword groupings are highly relevant – close synonyms and plurals only within the same ad groups. This will not only improve the relevance metrics for the ad group, but will also make it easier to develop specially-tailored ads and landing pages for specific ad groups and keyword sets.

Negative keywords are also a huge asset for quality score improvement. More negatives equals a higher CTR for your ads and keywords, since you will be eliminating irrelevant traffic that won’t drive clicks or conversions. If you have an established ad group with good historical data, run a search query report and look for queries with high impression counts and low click counts. Adding these queries (or specific words within the queries) as negatives will eliminate this low-CTR traffic and raise your overall CTR for the keyword they were matched to, and the text ad by extension.

It’s also a good idea to add negatives as soon as possible to eliminate poor account history. There are a lot of negative keywords that are safe to add at the very beginning – the word “free” comes to mind, if you’re in the business of selling items or services. This keyword indicates a total lack of purchase intent, so you’re unlikely to ever get a sale from this type of user. Your negative keyword list is going to vary drastically between industries, but nearly everybody has a few negatives that will be useful to add without having to back them up with historical data.

That’s it for this week. Next week, we’ll close out the series with a guide to improving quality score on the Google Display Network.

Posted in Google AdWords, Image Ads, Keywords, Landing Pages, PPC Basics, Quality Score, Text Ads | Leave a comment

Fixing AdWords Quality Score Issues (Part 2 of 4)

Posted on December 5, 2011 by

Note: this is the second part of a four part series detailing how to improve AdWords quality score issues at each level of your account. Check out part 1 here.

The next stops on our tour of improving Google quality scores are the campaign and ad group levels. Here we go…

Campaign Level

The most influential campaign-level quality score factor is mentioned in Google’s quality score help topic:

Your account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown

Geotargeting is available only on the campaign level (for now), so if your campaign is doing particularly badly in a specific area, you can always exclude traffic from that area. If you’re still getting conversions, you can create a brand-new campaign that is targeted only on that area, thereby isolating the bad quality score from the good. Factors that incur a bad quality score can “contaminate” an otherwise good campaign, so it’s better to isolate the worst of the worst in to it’s own segment so that it won’t bring down the aspects of your campaign that are working.

Another campaign-level tactic is to make sure your campaign target either the search network or the display network – never both. Quality score on the search network is calculated very differently than quality score on the display network (more on this in part 4 of this series), so you really need to separate these tactics in order to optimize for quality score. Plus, it’s a general best practice. You can’t target each network effectively when they’re both jammed in to the same campaign, so it’s a good idea to keep them separate regardless of the effect on quality score.

There’s also something to be said about separating your campaigns by product line, search intent, or other relevance categories. It probably won’t have an effect on your quality score (although we never know what’s behind those “other relevance factors” mentioned in the help topic), but it will put you in the right mindset for categorizing things in aspects of your account where it will affect your quality score. Plus, it helps you manage your budgets and campaign settings to make sure that each category stays profitable (and is easily cut out if it doesn’t turn a profit).

Ad Group Level

This is where we really start to see big impacts on the quality score. Two factors specifically mention ad groups:

  • The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
  • The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group

Granted, these factors are affected by your ads and keywords, but you can take some steps at the ad group level to fix these issues as well.

First off, each ad group should contain only a few keywords that are tightly related to each other. I use 5-20 keywords as a general rule of thumb, but I’ve also seen ad groups of only 1-2 keywords do pretty well. Try to avoid anything over 20 keywords unless you can come up with a really compelling reason why 20+ keywords are very closely related. Even the thesaurus only has about four or five synonyms per word – think about that the next time you try to determine if all of your keywords are relevant to each other.

You also need to make sure that the ads in each ad group are tightly related to the keywords you’ve selected. I always try to make sure that the top keyword in each ad group (defined by either total clicks or total conversions, preferably both) appears at least once in the ad. That’s a good start, but you can also manipulate the rest of the ad text to be relevant to what you’re offering. But don’t forget that your ad is a sales tool as well – you just need to balance the needs of the customer with the needs of the search engine, like a lot of other things in search engine marketing.

Also note that you’re being graded on the historical CTR of the display URLs in your ad group. Each ad that runs with a low CTR pointing to your domain is going to be a bad mark on your Google report card. Don’t ruin your reputation with a couple of crappy ads.

That’s it for part 2. Stay tuned next week for part 3, where we tackle quality score issues at the ad and keyword level.

Posted in Google AdWords, Keywords, PPC Basics, Quality Score, Search Engines, Text Ads | Leave a comment

Fixing AdWords Quality Score Issues (Part 1 of 4)

Posted on November 28, 2011 by

We paid search folks like to think that we’re mostly immune to the inscrutable wrath of Google, unlike those poor saps who work in SEO and have to constantly guess at what Google’s algorithm is looking for at any particular moment. But PPC has its own Google black box: quality score. It’s a little number that indicates how relevant our AdWords efforts are, affects the keyword bid you’ll need to make in order to show your ads where you want them to be, and is a significant factor in how Google ranks ads on the SERPs. And yet, Google is surprisingly opaque about how they actually calculate it. Here are the quality score factors, according to Google’s Quality Score help topic:

  • The historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on the Google domain
  • Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
  • The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
  • The quality of your landing page
  • The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
  • The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
  • Your account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown
  • Other relevance factors

Notice “other relevance factors”? That means that we’ll never really know everything that Google wants in order to assign a high quality score. However, we can still make improvements based on what we do know about the calculations. In the next four blog posts, I’m going to go over the different levels at which quality score is calculated, and what you can do at each level in order to improve it. Here’s what I’ll cover, and when I’ll cover it:

This week (11/28/11): Quality score at the account level
12/5/11: Quality score at the campaign and ad group level
12/12/11: Quality score at the ad and keyword level
12/19/11: Quality score in display network campaigns

So without further ado, here are some tips on how to improve quality score at the account level.

Account Level

To start our analysis of account-level quality score factors, allow me to direct your attention to what may be the most crucial overall factor in determining quality score:

“Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account.”

So even though Google doesn’t have a handy little stat at the account level like it does at the keyword level, your entire account does have a unified quality score, of a sort: your combined account history. Did you let your cousin’s cousin (who’s real good with computers) set up your AdWords account, only to see it crash and burn? Even if you paused those crappy campaigns and started anew, it’s still going to drag down your account quality score. No one really knows how long it takes to overcome a bad account quality score, but you’re probably looking at a few months minimum. It’s much better to have a solid quality score plan in place before you start an account, since it’s much easier to start with a good baseline rather than pull an account up from a quality score nosedive.

So what can you do? Basically, you don’t screw up in the first place. Have a plan in mind for how you’re going to structure your campaigns and ad groups before you even touch that brand new account. Draw out a tree structure covering your campaigns, and the ad groups you’ll have within them. Separate campaigns and ad groups by product lines, target audience, or customer intent. Keep each campaign and ad group small, manageable, and tightly relevant to the other components within them (more on this next week).

And if you’re already dealing with an account with a bad history…good luck. I wish I could say there was an easy fix, but at this level there’s not. The only thing that can solve a bad account history is a good account history, and that takes a long time to create. If you’re short on time, then you could just shut down your account and start a new one in order to start your quality score calculations fresh. But, this could get a little tricky – Google really, really doesn’t like you doing this, and if they find you using the same domain, billing address, or credit card for a duplicate AdWords account, you might get shut down. This is getting into some black/grey hat PPC stuff that I don’t really condone, but I will say this: I’ve seen it work before.

That’s it for this week. Stay tuned next week, when I’ll cover improving quality scores at the campaign and ad group level.

Posted in Google AdWords, PPC Basics, Quality Score | 2 Comments